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Aug. 21, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:09:25

1981 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show, 21 August 2011

A theory as to why I may be more critical of political action, a psychiatrist uses Freedomain Radio material in therapy, a criticism of my environmental stance, Izzy, philosophical parenting and UPB.

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	It is August the 21st, 2011.
	I hope you're doing very well. Thank you so much to everybody who has continued with the question about Ron Paul and political freedom.
	I'm sort of thinking about it, when I diverge from a large group of people Who are obviously very smart and very well-intentioned and I have no doubt that people who support political candidacies are smart and well-intentioned and genuinely believe that I'm the Pied Piper stealing votes from that which is necessary to free the world.
	And I think about Circumstances, because I always love to flirt with determinism.
	So I think about circumstances, what might be occurring, or what different history may there be that would lead me in one direction and other people in another direction.
	And I can come back to a difference in...
	I think professional experience or a professional action.
	When I was in the software field, for those who don't know, I was an entrepreneur for about 15 years and I co-founded a company and stayed there for, I think, seven or eight years and grew it to a fair size, then sold it, stayed on for a while longer, and then I was involved in the selling a bit again.
	And I was the head of R&D. My official title was Chief Technology Officer.
	And then later I did sales and I did marketing and all that kind of stuff.
	But I was really involved in research and development in the software field.
	And one of the things that I learned very early on in being an entrepreneur was that resources are extremely finite.
	And certainly when you're starting out in the entrepreneurial field, they are Extremely, extremely times three finite.
	And you really learn to do a lot of harsh examinations of opportunity costs.
	And so I was an entrepreneur responsible for the development of new products and the extension of existing products and had some successes and had some failures and so on and learned quite early that the difference between success and failure in the entrepreneurial world is entirely to do with the skepticism And rigor through which one approaches a proposed expenditure of resources.
	My God, what a dull way to put it.
	You've got to really be harsh and cross-examine either yourself or others who want to spend company resources in the development or extension of a new product.
	Because, of course, when you're running a company, there's so many different things that you can do to increase your sales, right?
	So let's say you've got a million-dollar budget to spend.
	Well, let's say that somebody handed me a million dollar budget to spend.
	So what would I do?
	Well, I could market, right?
	So I could raise brand awareness.
	I could advertise.
	I could go to trade shows.
	I could, you know, really work at selling.
	I could, of course, spend some of that on researching the competition, looking at new trends.
	And then I would have to figure out whether the existing platform, you know, we started in 16-bit Windows way back in the day.
	And so do you change platforms?
	Do you change your entire architecture?
	When do you go to the web and all those kinds of things?
	And what parts of the software do you develop and so on?
	And so from a near...
	And this is... Do you hire more people?
	Do you open a branch office?
	Do you... I mean, there's so many different things that you can do when you're an entrepreneur, when you have a million dollars to spend.
	And you have a prejudice and a bias.
	I was a technology geek since I was like...
	11 or 12 and would go into the computer lab on my Saturdays, even in the summer, and program the 2K pet computers.
	And so I loved to develop new things.
	I loved to develop new software and to create new features and functionality.
	And because that was my preference, I had to be really skeptical about whether that was the best thing for the business.
	And so before you'd spend a penny, You would look at all of your options and you would talk to as many experts as you can and you'd go to trade shows and you'd learn and you'd talk to your customers and you'd talk to your employees and figure out what their skill sets were and what they wanted.
	And eventually, I sort of tried to, you know, everybody who's successful in business tries as soon as they get a job to train his or her replacement.
	And so I would put out entrepreneurial opportunities within the company to say, well, what do you guys want to develop or what do you think is going to be the best?
	And people would then present to me their plans about how they would spend company money in order to increase sales and increase revenue and better satisfy customers or whatever.
	And the choice also is to develop customer-facing products or to develop internal tools like how to better produce the software, how to better customize the software, how to better produce interfaces which customers themselves can fix.
	All that.
	So many, so many choices.
	I don't mean to bore you with all the choices.
	I'm sure I am.
	But there's so many choices available.
	And so, you know, a couple of times a year we'd go through a process and I'd sit down with the board.
	We'd go through all the executives.
	I'd present my cases.
	My employees would present their cases to me.
	And we would try and figure out where we would get the best bang for the buck.
	And even...
	And whenever we failed to achieve our objectives, right?
	So we'd say, well, we're going to achieve X, you know, at $5 million in sales or whatever.
	If we'd achieved that, great.
	If we didn't, we'd have to figure out why.
	And figuring out why always came back to the same thing, which is completely humbling when you're looking at creating things in the future.
	It always came back to the same thing.
	And that same thing was that we had not been rigorous or skeptical enough and we had allowed our preferences to dictate what The allocation of our resources.
	We'd allowed the momentum of history.
	Well, you know, we already invested this amount in this product, so let's keep going.
	Or we thought it would help this relationship, which turned out to not be that effective.
	Or we thought these customers would like it, and so we just kept doing it.
	And we really needed to, and I think this is true of all, Businesses, particularly in the least regulated, most Wild West capitalistic area like software, you absolutely need to reinvent from scratch.
	You absolutely need to be skeptical about your holiest of holy approaches to things and look to overturn everything all the time.
	And so I think it was those grueling years of training in damned empirical humility that It's probably informed some of my approach to the expenditure of resources.
	I think part of me is looking at the freedom movement like a business, and in some ways it is like a business.
	It obviously has to be profitable to some degree.
	It has its goals, which are noble and wonderful and great, and I think there are very few people in the movement who would disagree with them fundamentally, the non-aggression principle and property rights and so on.
	And I think what has happened to me over the years is that A decade and a half of pretty grueling training in the entrepreneurial world has led me to say, to ask all the same questions I would have as a software executive looking at the expenditure of resources.
	And the expenditure of resources in the freedom movement vastly dwarfs anything I ever had control of in the business world.
	I had influence over in the business world.
	And I think I've sort of said, okay, so you've got a bunch of people coming up and saying political action is the way to go.
	Political action, this is where we should spend 20, 30, 40, 50 million dollars.
	So this is where we should spend staggering amounts of time and energy in person on the internet at conferences.
	And this should be, I don't know, I mean, politics, I really believe, and if you take the religious aspect out of libertarianism, which is certainly there to some degree.
	If you look at the expenditure of resources within libertarianism, I would imagine that 90 to 95% of it goes towards political action or attempts to influence political action of some kind.
	So I think my entrepreneurial instincts kick in and say, okay, so let's go back and look at, let's do a post-mortem, let's go back and look what was promised and look what was achieved.
	Well, what was promised was kind of amazing, you know, that this was going to give us some significant freedom.
	What has been achieved? Well, a huge diminishment of that freedom.
	I'm not saying it's causal, but it's definitely correlated.
	And so part of me says, okay, well, you know, what has been missed, right?
	Whenever you have a significant failure, you need to go back and look at something that you may have missed.
	Where have we put our resources that could better be put elsewhere?
	And you have to just throw all of your preconceptions out the window and you just have to go right back to the evidence.
	The evidence is that political action has failed, has failed, has failed, has failed, has failed, has failed, has failed.
	If this is the best we can do, we're doomed.
	If political action is the best we can do, there is no hope for liberty.
	And so, again, just as an entrepreneur, I come back and say, okay, well, how do we know this is the best approach?
	How do we know that this is the best approach?
	Or is it just the one that seems the most obvious?
	Or is this just the one where people feel, in a sense, the most comfortable?
	Or is this just the one where we have the most skills?
	You know, I mean, we would have skill sets in SQL Server and then we'd say, okay, well, we have to go to Oracle or whatever for a number of reasons.
	So then we just have to throw out all of the skill sets.
	This happens all the time in the entrepreneurial world.
	Ooh, I'm really good at 16-bit Windows GUI programming.
	Nope, we've got to go to the web and learn JavaScript and ASP or whatever.
	So overturning your existing skill set is something that you just have to grit your teeth and do on a regular basis.
	And my concern is that same rigor that Oddly enough, the free market economists praise, praise, praise in the free market is not being applied to the pursuit of liberty in the world.
	If people are at all interested, and I'm certainly interested in my own reasons for being so hyper-deviant from the mainstream of a subculture, which is my opposition, or skepticism of political action.
	Hey, I'm happy if people want to make the case.
	I think it's great. But I have some resources to spend in this area.
	Of course, I've taken enormous sacrifices to some degree and hits in this arena, gave up a pretty secure job to beg for shekels on the internet and hopefully rouse people through philosophical rigor.
	So, I mean, I have a dog.
	And I obviously, like everybody in the freedom movement, really, really want freedom to be achieved as soon as possible and not to waste time or do worse than waste time in the pursuit of that which cannot work or cannot be achieved.
	So I'm skeptical.
	To me, we have a fixed amount of resources as a whole to devote to pursuing freedom.
	Just as I would in the entrepreneurial world without prejudice towards political action.
	I mean, I would love it if political action would work.
	My goodness. I mean, one of the tiny values of political action working is to make my job a lot easier.
	But I do have to be true to the values of economics, at least.
	I mean, there are obviously other reasons why I think it's important.
	But the values of economics are that all resources are finite and all human desires are infinite.
	And the opportunity costs of going in the wrong direction Are completely staggering.
	And so I think, because I'm thinking of the people who are really keen on political action, I actually, I mean, who are really in the strong libertarian, strong anarchist, strong anarchist position.
	And I'm trying to think of those who have been entrepreneurs, who've been responsible for the sort of market focused expenditure of resources in the pursuit of a particular goal.
	I can't think of too many of them.
	I mean there are people who are entrepreneurs in terms of they're sort of in the libertarian world and they're sort of going through donations and so on.
	But they tend to have already been heavily invested in the political arena and they also tend to have or at least have some openness towards religiosity which is again that's part of just sort of my skepticism or skeptical approach to the world.
	And so I'm trying to think of people who really had a career in the allocation of limited resources in the pursuit of a particular goal, who are also big supporters of political action.
	I couldn't think of any. That obviously means very little.
	I mean, what do I know about the libertarian movement and the individuals within it?
	But I think that has a lot to do with my approach to dealing with this question of political action and how well it's going to work.
	I think that we really need to show skeptical rigor and be willing to overturn our own assumptions because this is the funny thing, right?
	Libertarians are very passionate and keen on other people overthrowing their assumptions.
	You think the state is good? Think again.
	You think that violence can solve social problems?
	Think again. You think that taxation is not theft?
	Think again. And this think again mantra, or in some cases think for the first time, I think is really important.
	And I always find it difficult to look at, I mean, to either look in the mirror or to look at a group and say, this group is advocating values or methodologies that they themselves or I myself am not using.
	And so if we want other people to overturn all their prior assumptions, if you want people to You know, detonate the existing cathedrals of their mental constructs into ashes to start again.
	I think we really need to apply that same skepticism and approach it like somebody who has nothing to do with libertarianism.
	Approach it like somebody who doesn't have a dog in the fight.
	Approach it from a position of almost pure skepticism and say, okay, let's throw everything aside.
	Let's look at the claims of political action and let's look at the achievements of political action.
	And let's look at those who are politically active and the degree to which they are turning back and saying, we didn't get what we wanted to get.
	What happened? What went wrong?
	What have we missed? Now, I've repeatedly tried to point out and will continue to repeatedly point out that which I think is missed, which is we simply are not taking into account the early childhood experiences of people in the world.
	I go where the science tells me.
	I go where the data is.
	And this is relatively new.
	A lot of the data about this stuff is relatively new.
	But if we praise and value an economic system, the creative destruction of an economic system that overturns prior assumptions at the drop of a hat, I think we need to apply that same methodology to our own approach to how to achieve freedom.
	And that way we can model for people The very behavior that we are trying to inculcate or to grow within society, which is to not limply roll along the turning timbers of ancient cultures, but rather to, you know, jump off, plant your feet firmly on the ground, navigate by the objective stars, and map the world as it really is, and challenge all of the momentum of prior assumptions.
	That's what we want from the world.
	We need to do that within our own communities.
	We need to question All of our holiest beliefs, all of our most sacred approaches, and all of the momentum of our own approaches to how to achieve freedom.
	So have they worked? Well, no.
	Because we say this about the government, we say to people, you need to be empirical.
	Have social programs worked? No.
	Does Social Security work for the long run?
	No. Does Medicare work for the long run?
	No. Does government protectionism work for the long run?
	No. Does violence work for the long run?
	No. Does state doesn't work at all?
	Dammit. No. That's the empirical evidence, but we need to turn the same high-powered laser beams on our own assumptions.
	Does political action work? No.
	So what if we missed? How can we find it?
	And how can we really start making powerful and productive change within society?
	That's my approach.
	And I hope that you will join me in that questioning.
	And unfortunately, if you don't join me in that questioning, intellectually, you remain on the side of inertia, which is on the side of statism.
	We need to be more self-critical.
	We need to be willing to overthrow our prior assumptions.
	That's the only way that a truly new future could be built.
	Anyway, that's my brief spiel.
	We'll turn back to the Sunday show.
	Thank you, everybody, who's been so patient in waiting.
	And I will talk to you soon. My name's Cody.
	I got to meet you up at Porkfest.
	I did want to share some good news, though, in spreading...
	Wait, sorry. Were you the muddy, drunken one?
	No, no, no, no. Just kidding. That's everybody.
	Just kidding. Go on. I was actually the adoptee, but we're not going to get...
	Oh, yes, I remember. How are you doing, man?
	You sent me an email, too, recently.
	Thank you. I did.
	I did want to share with you some really cool news of some of the truth that you're putting out of me helping spread it in my life.
	And I'm a bit nervous because I've never done this whole Skype thing, so I've written down what I'd like to go over.
	Please do. I've been in group therapy led by a psychiatrist for opiate addiction for over three years, and I've been clean for three years and a few months now from that.
	And the psychiatrist recently asked me on the side after group if there's any interesting podcasts that I'd like to share with them.
	Nothing big deal. It was really kind of I ended up sending him the YouTube playlist link for the Bomb and the Brain series.
	So the next time I saw him at group a week later, he said he was surprised.
	It surprised him and that it wasn't really what it was.
	It expected, but since it was what he termed, quote, the elephant in the room, he may try to incorporate it into the group.
	Now, since for a lot of the people in that group, it's kind of their first place getting out of addiction, they're still quite vulnerable.
	I didn't really expect much from it, but at next group that I attended two weeks later, at check-in, we were all handed a paper with 10 questions to fill out anonymously to find out our ACE score.
	Sorry, for those who don't know, that's the adverse childhood experiences score, which at least seems to be strongly correlated to particular kinds of adult dysfunctions.
	Sorry, go ahead. Exactly and it was completely voluntary so if anyone didn't feel comfortable to fill it out it wasn't required but everyone did end up filling it out for that group and there was eleven people there that evening.
	So during the group session we went over the results in anonymous statistics and the psychiatrist handed out an overview of trauma addiction.
	Now what was really interesting or the cool thing is that in the handout it specifically references your YouTube bomb in the brain For the fact that, quote, trauma, especially childhood trauma, plays a major role in addiction.
	So I was just like, wow, right there for all these people who don't, a lot of times really don't know much at all about any philosophy.
	To be exposed to that was just, it was great.
	Fantastic. It was so wonderful to feel.
	Wow, good for you. And, you know, just for those who don't know it, the Bomb of the Brain series, which people can get a hold of it, fdrurl.com forward slash B-I-B. I'm just gathering together a bunch of research over the internet, and I have an interview with Dr.
	Vincent Felitti, who is the head of the ACE study.
	And so, yeah, it's not my work, as I'll be clear.
	All I did was, you know, did the data burrow.
	But I hope that people will find it useful.
	I think it's very, very important.
	Fantastic. And for your information, the A-scores that we had, there was at least half of the people had an A-score four or higher.
	So it was just shocking to me because one of the girls who actually...
	We weren't supposed to give out the numbers, but one girl did anyway.
	And she had an eight, but she still...
	Didn't see the correlation between the sexual abuse, the beating and everything.
	She's like, I, to quote, she's like, I really don't know if there's a connection between that and my addiction.
	I'm just like, oh, my goodness.
	So I'm just, I'm really, you know, to her credit, sorry to interrupt, but I mean, how would she?
	You know, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily know that there was a correlation between eating bread and gaining weight or eating, I mean, unless there were nutritionists out there saying, you know, I just like, hey, this tastes good.
	So, I mean, how would you know?
	I mean, this is, I think, part of the extreme negligence on the part of people who have or know of this information who aren't publicizing it because there's just no way for people to know without that.
	Oh, it's very hard, I would say.
	But anyways, I just wanted to give you that great information.
	I'm really working hard to get this information to people who would never, I don't feel, would be exposed to this type of stuff and need it the most.
	Oh, fantastic. That's just wonderful.
	That's just wonderful. Thank you. Not a problem.
	I'll be talking to you again soon.
	I appreciate what you do.
	Thank you so much. Right.
	Great. And yeah, please do thank the psychiatrist.
	I think that's just great stuff.
	And yeah, he's right. It is the elephant in the room.
	It's the stuff that people simply can't or won't talk about.
	It's very challenging.
	It's very challenging. I mean, we're getting there.
	You know, I just saw. I was just getting some pizza the other day, and I was reading a local newspaper where they were talking about the relationship between depressed moms and behavior disorders within kids.
	This is just in the newspaper. And I think it's starting to come out.
	I don't think that...
	I'm not going to take much credit for it myself because I think it's just a general social thing.
	But I do think that it is starting to become a little bit more mainstream where people are talking about all this kind of stuff.
	And I think they really are starting to understand the connection between early childhood experiences and stuff which goes on for adults.
	And I hope... I mean, to me, that's the biggest thing that people need to understand and get.
	In order for the world to become free.
	So I do really express my appreciation for what it's worth to the psychiatrist.
	It's good to hear good stuff about a psychiatrist.
	That's nice as well. So I appreciate that.
	Thanks, Ken. You have a good Sunday.
	You're very welcome. Again, it was very nice to meet you at Porkfest.
	You too. Tim.
	The one they call Tim.
	It looks like he may be having some connection issues.
	In the meantime, we will go on to Alec.
	Hello, can you hear me? Sure can.
	Oh, that's cool. Yeah, so I'm calling from Germany.
	Hello from Germany. Hello.
	And yeah, I'm a noob, and I'm also a little bit nervous, but I think I'll manage it.
	I've got actually three points.
	The first two are related to the recent YouTube video where you were in RT Media, where it was, will Canadian oil go to China instead of the US? Yes.
	And, yeah, I have to point out two things.
	One was, you say at the minute, I can actually tell it to you because I also wrote it down, at 8.36 you said, the invention of emails and fax machines reduced the amount of gas required to ship around documents around the world.
	And I just wanted to, like, say to that that actually technological solutions actually lead to accelerated ecological destruction and pollution.
	And you can read it up.
	I'll make in the chat a link.
	It's called the Gefunz paradox.
	Just, like, for an example, through emails and faxes, more orders, more stuff to ship around means more gas.
	So, you can look it up, that one.
	I just wanted to add that point.
	And then, also, you say at 9.25, you need wealth, wealth, wealth, wealth, wealth to protect the environment.
	And I don't really agree with that at all, because...
	Let me take, I love this argument from you, and also I forgot to tell, I really love your show, and I'm listening to it since six months or so.
	And so there's your argument of the gun in the room, the well-known one, where you say the state uses force to protect us from force.
	So you are saying we need wealth to protect us from wealth.
	And why am I saying that is because actually wealth means ecological destruction because we didn't have yet invented a way to have wealth without absorbing resources and destructing the ecology.
	So that's just what I wanted to say, those two points about that YouTube thing.
	Yeah. First of all, I really appreciate you bringing those up.
	I think you posted this on the YouTube channel as well.
	Yeah, exactly. And you seemed, I wanted to just point out, and I thought it was great, you seemed very happy.
	This was you, right?
	You were like, ah, Steph, I finally got you in an error.
	Please, you have to look up this.
	And I did make a note of it, and that was on my list of things to do, but I just wanted to make sure I was talking to the right person.
	Yeah, exactly. That's me.
	And I was like, I was so into it.
	And yes, I really wanted to come this time.
	It motivated me actually to like, last week, I wanted to do it.
	And then the other week, but I never made it.
	And now I'm here. And now I've got actually something also to say.
	No, that's great. Look, I appreciate that.
	And I've heard some of the arguments.
	So let me just see if I can address them.
	And I'm no expert in this area.
	So, you know, correct me if I go astray.
	Yeah, me neither. There is, of course, there's the argument which says that, for instance, people who have printers, so if you wrote up a letter in the past, and you typed it on some manual typewriter, and it was a long letter, and you made a mistake, you might just white it out, or you might just, you know, exit out or whatever, like you wouldn't redo the whole thing.
	But now that you have computers with word processors, you are going to reprint the whole thing.
	And that, of course, causes more use of energy, more use of paper, and so on.
	So, in some ways, and I've heard that argument, and I think this...
	I don't know whether it's true or not.
	I think these things are hard to measure, but I certainly accept it as an important argument that certain forms of technology have increased our use of things.
	Now, some... And I thought of a better example afterwards, which isn't a cheat, but anyway.
	Some, I think, undoubtedly do reduce energy.
	So, for instance, e-books.
	I mean, I can't imagine a scenario under which, you know, cutting down a tree, bleaching the paper, getting the inks and the cover, and shipping the book all over the place, and people driving to bookstores to get it, and so on, or libraries.
	An e-book clearly is far less energy consumption than a book, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure.
	I think I could disagree with that, if you would use hemp instead of tree.
	Well, but even then, you still have to deliver it around.
	I mean, if that's not the case, then I don't understand anything about economics.
	Yeah, I know what you mean.
	It's a very tricky thing, and also to actually track it down, as you say, or make the statistics is very difficult.
	Right, but if you just look, because your argument was, and whether it's valid or not, I mean, I'm certainly willing to explore it, Your argument was that if stuff becomes cheaper, then people order it more.
	If it becomes more economically efficient, then people order it more.
	Which is sort of like the argument that says you can never solve road congestion because if you build bigger roads, people just move further away.
	And so that may or may not be true.
	And whether there is truth in this is probably hard to figure out because there are so many factors.
	But I think in the realm of e-books, that has to be.
	That has to be something that's in a different category because the amount of energy to create and host an e-book and to download it is just tiny, tiny compared to having to make and ship a book and having somebody have to pick it up and then have to eventually dispose of it.
	I can't imagine that that's more energy.
	Again, somebody may write to me and say, aha, you're wrong again.
	But that's just my way of looking at it.
	I think that's a huge advancement.
	And so I thought of that as sort of a better example.
	Now, as far as faxing goes, I think that's a little bit different.
	You may be a younger man than I am, even younger, staggeringly.
	But I remember back in the day, and this actually comes through my brother who was in business back in the day when faxes came in.
	Faxes were actually a pain in the ass for people when they first came in.
	If you were in a service provision, because, you know, you'd be working away on some document, and the client would say, where's the document?
	And you'd say, ah, it's in the mail, right?
	And that would buy you an extra day, because you'd work on it overnight, and then drop it off in the mail the next day.
	I'm not condoning such rank falsehoods, and I'm certainly not saying that any family member of mine ever participated in it.
	Neither did I in the business world, but this is apparently, you hear these tales.
	But of course, when the fax came in, you'd say, well, fax me what you got.
	And then unfortunately, you were, oh, the fax line is down.
	Oh, I'm having trouble with my fax.
	You just come up with other stuff. Anyway, but what I was specifically referring to was prior to faxes coming in, I mean, businesses would continually be couriering documents, dozens of them a day back and forth, or would be in the mail and so on.
	And I have to, you know, I do have to stand by this, right?
	I mean, so in this particular instance, the amount of couriers that were flying around the city were just enormous and the amount of expense and wasted energy relative to a fax was enormous because this way, of course, you could get a document to someone with virtually no expenditure, you know, tie up a phone line and, you know, a couple of pennies of electricity and so on.
	So that act of faxing has to be economically cheaper.
	Now, does that mean that people produced a million times more documents?
	No, I don't think that was the case.
	I don't think it was the case because these documents were just...
	They used to be couriered around and now they're faxed.
	Now, some people may write to me and I can hear this already because I'm getting good at sensing the audience.
	Some people are going to write to me and say, yes, but most of those people were bike couriers and therefore it was not an expenditure of energy.
	In fact, it added to human health for all these documents to be flying around the city.
	Well, not in winter so much because up here it's kind of cold.
	So I agree with you that if you If you cut the price of an iPad to $1.99, that's going to cause a lot of people to order an iPad.
	So I have no doubt that in certain situations that is the case.
	I don't think it's the case in all situations.
	I think there are lots of situations wherein economic efficiency produces better results.
	Now, the last thing I will say before you can rebut the living hell out of what I'm saying, which is fine, of course, is that...
	This has to occur in the realm of all other things being equal in the realm of economics.
	And that's just not an aesthetic cheat for me to, in quote, win.
	It's that if you look at, say, online ordering, I think we can all understand that it's more environmentally friendly to have stuff shipped to you from down the street than it is to have stuff shipped to you from China.
	And so... The difference, of course, tends to be in...
	I mean, I hate to even use these statist words, but what are we going to do?
	Can't reinvent the whole language.
	Things like, you know, regulation, environmental, health and safety, union laws, protectionism, tariffs, taxes, all of this kind of stuff, which creates this completely weird...
	I mean, people in the future are just not going to understand how the hell is it cheaper to get something shipped from China than it is to get something shipped from next door.
	And that's in a regulatory framework.
	And so what I mean, and since I was really talking in opposition to a regulatory framework, I hope I can be forgiven the sort of after tacking on.
	But I think that the generation of wealth...
	Leads in particular to environmental predation when you create unbalanced economies so when the wages of Chinese workers say are artificially suppressed or economic efficiencies are artificially suppressed in China for various reasons and low wages is a form of suppression of economic efficiency because it means people over allocate to labor and under allocate to capital but relative To America,
	where economic or other places, Europe, where economic inefficiencies are exacerbated through a variety of regulations to the point where having some wage-repressed Chinese guy make your stuff and ship it to you, It turns out to be cheaper than having some guy down the road do it.
	But that's not the economy.
	That's the state creating these distortions in the marketplace that I think add to that.
	So that's sort of a minor off-the-cuff defense.
	I hope it doesn't sound completely ridiculous and make some small amount of sense perhaps.
	Yeah. Yeah, I've got a catchphrase there.
	Think global.
	No, no. Think global.
	Do local or something like that.
	Anyhow, I just wanted to point that one out.
	Thanks for your response.
	I don't really have anything to add to it.
	I just wanted to show you the direction of this, which I also just recently read, this JFON's Paradox.
	which I think is very interesting to read in.
	And I will read it.
	And I just want to make sure people, so people understand the argument that you're bringing to bear, which is a great one.
	It's Jeevon's, G-E-V-O-N-S paradox.
	In economics, the Jeevon's paradox.
	Sometimes Jeevon's effect is the preposition, sorry, it's the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase rather than decrease the rate of consumption of that resource.
	So a typical example would be, hey, look, I found magical elves that can pull coal out of the ground at one-tenth of the cost that it used to be.
	Well, everybody's going to switch to coal, which increases the consumption of coal.
	That's the basic concept.
	Exactly. Right.
	And I think that's unarguable that, I mean, when the price drops, all other things being equal, consumption increases.
	I think that's unarguable.
	But I don't think that that's the sum totality of technological progress.
	So for fixed resources, no doubt.
	No doubt about it. And...
	But for other things more complicated like e-books and manufacturing and shipping and faxes and all that kind of stuff, I think it's a different category.
	Sure, sure. We might never know.
	We might never know because it will never happen maybe.
	I'm sorry, can I just say that again?
	I just missed that last time. Well, we can't never make a comparison of which one is valid, because it's either one or the other, so we can't really check it if it's valid, the statement I do, because I think there will always be technological solutions and advancements, and so we don't really have something to compare it with, unless we go maybe to indigenous cultures.
	Right. Let me just carry on to the next part.
	What would your response be with what I said when I quoted you?
	You need wealth, wealth, wealth to protect the environment.
	And I think that is like a little bit vice versa.
	Or not a little bit, totally vice versa.
	If you protect the environment, you end up with more wealth?
	No. When wealth is created, in order to create wealth, you have to destruct the environment.
	It's like you knock with one hand over the wall, and with the other hand, you build it up again.
	That's, I think, you know...
	Okay, but I think you may be casting the net a little bit wide when you talk about destroying the environment.
	Let's just take a silly example.
	I'm walking through the woods and I stop to take a drink from a mountain stream that is bubbling clear and delicious down the side of the heather.
	That is not destroying the environment, right?
	No, totally not. If I cut down a tree to build a house, would that be considered destroying the environment?
	Well, it depends.
	It actually really depends. I mean, in our culture, how it's being done, totally yes.
	No, no, no. I didn't say in our culture.
	Sorry, sorry. I'm being annoyingly.
	Let's start with the minimum.
	Because the moment we bring our entire culture in, it gets too complicated for my little brain to handle.
	But let's just start with, you know, so let's say if a beaver chews down a tree to make a dam, is the beaver destroying the environment?
	Well, no. No, actually not.
	No. Okay, so if a human being cuts down a tree to make a house, he's not destroying the environment.
	No, he's not.
	No. Okay.
	So, and the reason that I'm not trying to score any points or prove you wrong or anything like that, but I'm just trying to sort of point out, I don't view human beings as separate from the environment.
	And all animals attempt to adapt to the environment to serve their survival needs.
	I mean, every animal does that.
	That's why bears go into hibernation in the winter, rather than frolic around in the snow and starve to death.
	So, all animals, you know, they'll sort of find or make a cave or Bunnies will burrow into the ground and they all try to alter their environment to increase their chances.
	I know where it's going now.
	The state causes excessive productions and that's actually the cause.
	Well, you know with me, I've got to blame either early childhood or the state.
	I have two drums and I sort of move from one drum to the other and that's what I call variety in this show.
	I'm sad to say, but that's it.
	It's either early childhood or it is the state.
	No, I actually wasn't heading towards the state.
	I was simply pointing out that Human beings are part of the environment.
	We do, at a staggeringly higher level, we do that which all other animals do, but we do it at a much greater level, which is to adapt our environment.
	Let me quickly say something.
	Virtue is like lovemaking.
	As soon as there's violence involved, it's not lovemaking anymore.
	And I would use exactly that phrasing for how we treat the environment.
	If you tear down a tree because you want to build a house out of it, if you do it with love, it's all fine.
	But our modern culture is doing it violently, so that is then destructive and it doesn't make sense.
	Does that make sense? A little bit more to explain point?
	Yeah, I certainly agree with that.
	I have a mental image of a A beaver humping a tree.
	So I have to just work through that in my own mind, given, of course, the number of meanings of the word beaver.
	Anyway, and tree, as of Alex Simbel.
	But let's just move on.
	No, look, if virtue was exactly the same as lovemaking, then I would manage about, you know, three, three and a half minutes of virtue, and then I'd just fall asleep.
	But anyway, I agree with you.
	That's an example of what you make, actually.
	I heard it somewhere where you said that.
	No, I'm sure I did.
	But I will say that in a free society, the control of a resource is most likely to pass to the person who can get the most sustainable use out of that You know, it's the old fairy tale, you know, the goose that lays the golden egg, right?
	So you've got this goose and every day the goose lays a golden egg and then some idiot gets hold of the goose and says, my God, there must be millions of eggs in there.
	And he hacks open the goose to try and find the golden egg and all he gets is, you know, goose gizzards and so on, right?
	But if you sort of leave the goose alone and you just let the goose produce the golden egg every day, you have an infinity, near infinity of resources.
	And I think that there are enormous numbers of ways in which the resources accumulate under the control of people who do not have an economic interest in their long-term sustainability.
	And I think that's hugely tragic.
	And I think that the best thing for the environment is for private property to win out as much as humanly possible.
	It's not even an economic fairytale, but it's sort of a cautionary tale about when the government first took over, I think it was Yellowstone National Park in America, that they almost completely wiped it out.
	Because they did not have that same interest in sustainability.
	I've done essays on the Atlantic card in the same way.
	I mean, this Atlantic card off the coast of Newfoundland was a staggering resource and super abundant.
	It lasted for 400 years until the government got involved.
	Again, I don't want to sort of get – I know I'm going between one drum and the other.
	But I agree with you that we need something as sustainable.
	But the one thing I would also remember is that, for instance, the increase in the consumption of energy around the world has, by some methods of calculation, has been responsible for allowing four or five billion people to exist who otherwise would not be alive. has been responsible for allowing four or five billion people They would have died or never been born and so on.
	I agree that we need to be more intelligent, but I don't have a button called save the environment at the expense of four billion human people that I'm willing to push.
	But I do have a button which says let's create a system where sustainability is the most profitable thing in the world because that's the only way that I know of to maintain the environment as best as possible.
	Yeah, I can live with that one.
	I think it's a good one to close the subject.
	And my last thing, my third point is a little bit personal.
	Because, well, you motivate everyone to express their anarchic thoughts to their family and to the people around.
	I love that video on YouTube where you say you are a hero.
	You don't need some magical power source or whatever.
	You just go out there and influence and talk to the people in your neighborhood.
	And I do that, and I noticed that that is just not enough.
	And I was thinking, should I open a YouTube channel?
	Should I do something similar here in Germany or whatsoever?
	But I don't know.
	I didn't want to jump on that bandwagon of YouTube, so I was actually thinking to just go into schools and hand out leaflets and make a date and a time and say, look, I'll teach for free.
	Anarchy! Come with me!
	Something like that. But I am not ready yet.
	I don't feel well enough prepared to speak with young Yeah,
	I know what you mean.
	I don't know about the school thing.
	I think that anarchy is still – I mean for a lot of people, it's three doors down from Satanism, right?
	So I don't know that kids bouncing home from school and saying, you know, a nice man came and told me that all state is violence.
	And mom, tell me why you work for the IRS again.
	And I don't know that even if you managed to slip through the filters, I think it would be a one-shot deal.
	And I think a lot of people would probably get in quite a bit of trouble there.
	That's my guess. Maybe it's different in Germany because… I mean, Germany has had a completely fascinating history, particularly in terms of child rearing since the Second World War, as I've mentioned in shows.
	You know, when my cousins would come over from Germany when I was a kid, they weren't allowed to play violent games.
	And of course, we were all playing war, because that's what happens when you win a war, is that you get addicted to war fever.
	And when you lose a war, if you have any brains, and Germans seem to have an enormous number of brains, you sort of say, holy crap, let's stop messing about with the war stuff.
	And they turned more towards freedom than their victors did, right?
	I mean, England put in socialism after the Second World War, and Germany put in capitalism after the Second World War.
	And in that way, Germany truly won the war where it counts in the long run.
	And so, I can't remember why the hell I started talking about this, but I'm sure it was something.
	Yeah, so now, of course, Germany has all of this excess productivity that can be hosed off by all the Mediterranean wastrels who've retired at 45.
	So anyway, I just sort of wanted to mention that.
	So I don't know that the school thing is necessarily the way to go.
	I think if you like writing essays, write essays.
	I think if you think that YouTube is great, I think YouTube is...
	It's a great medium for getting information out.
	But the most important thing, I think, is to remember that you don't have an obligation to fix the world.
	You don't have a fundamental obligation to fix the world.
	The best way is to...
	I like what Winston Churchill has.
	He says, find a job you love and you'll never have to work again a day in your life.
	And so if you find something that you love to do, I wouldn't sort of think, well, what's the best thing to do?
	I would think, well, what's the best thing for me to do?
	What's the thing that's going to be most exciting and interesting for me to do?
	And I would take it from there.
	And until that comes along, I would simply, you know, be patient and wait for inspiration.
	Awesome. Yeah, thanks.
	That was a good advice.
	So in those words, I want to pass on to the next.
	And yeah, thank you very much for letting me on the show.
	Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much for your great comments, great criticisms, and I really appreciate it.
	And I promise you that I will look more into this theory because I think it's quite fascinating.
	I've heard bits of it before. I didn't know it was formalized as a full theory.
	You know, like this idea that if you buy a Prius, it's worse for the environment than if you buy a gas guzzler because they've got to make these batteries out of terrible stuff and ship it all the way from foreign countries and so on.
	So, anyway, I think it's very interesting.
	I'd like to look into more. I appreciate you bringing that up.
	Awesome. So, yeah, probably see you next Sunday.
	And keep listening.
	Fantastic. Thanks, man. Bye.
	Next caller is Tim.
	Hi, he's back. We're getting re-Timed.
	Hi, Tim. Which Tim are we talking about here?
	Oh, we had a Tim who had sound problems.
	The Tim on the phone. Yeah, that was me.
	I apologize. You know, with all this technology advancements, I still can't get my internet to be reliable.
	I'm on the phone now. But thank you so much for having me on, Steph.
	You know, I have probably a million questions, a long-time listener, but I've never called them.
	And I just wanted to say that, you know, the best podcast that I listen to and the stuff that I've really used the most in my life is the stuff centered around the family, and especially your daughter, because I am married, no kids, and we're planning on having a child in the future.
	And so I just wanted to say, first of all, that Any new updates with your daughter?
	Anything interesting related to UPB or anything going on?
	I would be happy to share with you a UPB story with my daughter if people would be of interest.
	Yeah, sure. Alright, let me just recollect...
	So yeah, this is a story about my daughter, NUPB. This is from maybe a month or five or six weeks ago.
	She goes through these phases, and I must say that I think that's probably the case with most of us.
	She feels really friendly towards people, and then she feels a bit more skittish of people.
	She's sort of testing the elastic boundaries of attachment and so on, which I think is all perfectly sensible.
	And she's two and a half, or she was about two and a half when this was going on.
	And so she went through a phase where she would go up and hug kids and then she went through a phase where she would run away from them and so on, right?
	She was like Mickey. At the time, she was like this Mickey Rourke character in Barfly.
	She's like, Faye Dunaway, I think, comes up to him.
	I think he's playing Charles Bukowski or something.
	He's a drunk and comes up to him and says, I hate people.
	Don't you hate people? And he says, no, I don't hate people.
	I just seem to feel better when they're not around.
	It sounds like a great line. And so she went through a phase where she was saying no to children, right?
	So, you know, if children would come up and say hi to me, would she say no?
	Because she's going through a bit of a possessive daddy phase, even with her mom, if Christine and I have a hug and a kiss.
	And so I was talking to her about this.
	And, you know, it's because I don't like the children.
	You know, and of course she does have, she's got great fences, so she does like some of the children.
	But she's, you know, she's quite fierce.
	And I think that's just great.
	And I'm not going to say that that doesn't come from somewhere in the family tree.
	But, um, so I was sort of talking to her and I was saying, um, you know, it's not, you know, you don't have to play with kids if you don't want to play with them.
	Obviously, you know, I mean, nobody's going to force you to play with kids, but it's not, I don't think it's very nice for you to, uh, to, to yell at them, to yell, no, because, you know, they don't know that you're just yelling it more to me than to them.
	And, you know, it took a little while, but, but we were sort of talking about this and she said, but I want to yell at the children.
	Okay. Um, I said, but you know, I, I've never yelled at you.
	And she's like, yeah, that's true.
	And I said, mama's never yelled at you.
	That's true. And I said, you wouldn't like it if we yelled at you.
	And she thought about this for a long time.
	And then I said, and so, you know, you wouldn't like it if we yelled at you, and I don't think the other children like it when you yell at them.
	She thought about it for a long time, and then she said, okay.
	Okay, daddy, you can yell at me.
	I thought that was just stone genius.
	She got that whole UPB thing down.
	In other words, I have the right to say to her, don't yell if I don't yell.
	And so in order to retain her right to yell at other children, she was willing to grant me the right to yell at her.
	And I thought, holy crap, she just blew my mind.
	I think that is just...
	I mean, that's not perfect UPB, but it's so close that you can stick the tip of your tongue out and taste it.
	So I thought that was very interesting.
	I also do find it really fascinating the degree to which there's this fluidity in children, at least in my daughter, between make-believe and reality.
	And... You know, we've a lot of times, we get these contradictory messages about imagination, right?
	So, you know, follow your dreams, have imagination, picture all of this wonderful stuff.
	That's one sort of message we get.
	And the other is that, you know, too much imagination leads you to go off and be a daydreamer in a dream world and you can't connect with reality anymore and, you know, you end up playing Dungeons& Dragons well into your 40s or something.
	And so, I've really been quite fascinated about the degree to which this is sort of changing within her.
	Because now she's, you know, makes up games all the time.
	And, you know, she'll grab things out of the air and they become airplanes or kites or bumblebees or whatever.
	And we sort of play these games.
	And these games have elaborate made up rules on the spot that can be kind of hard to follow.
	But once you get into the rhythm, it's really, really enjoyable.
	But it is also fascinating to see the degree to which when she bumps up against imagination versus reality, she has no doubt about things whatsoever.
	So one of the games, and she actually invented this game, which I thought was great.
	The game itself can be a bit challenging, but the game is, I pretend to fall asleep.
	And she sticks her finger in my nose.
	That's the game.
	And she came up with it. It's called Snooty Snooty, for obvious reasons.
	And sometimes it feels almost like she's going up to her elbow and stimulating my early childhood memories, which is obviously quite exciting.
	So I was giving her a bath this morning, and I was reading.
	She wanted to stay in the bath, right?
	Sometimes she's quite aquatic.
	And so there was a book in the bathroom, one of her books, and I was reading her The Story of Goldilocks.
	And I was just playing, and so I said, okay, look, Isabella, Goldilocks has fallen asleep, and this little picture of Goldilocks fell asleep.
	Goldilocks has fallen asleep.
	And I said, you know what?
	Oh, Daddy's going to play Snooty Snooty with Goldilocks.
	And so I sort of started waggling my finger towards Goldilocks, the picture of Goldilocks' nose.
	And she interrupted me.
	She said, no, Dada, don't play Snooty Snooty with Goldilocks.
	That's just a picture. Don't scratch my book.
	With your nails? I'm like, oh, don't I feel put in my place, you know?
	I mean, it's fantastic.
	That's a picture, it's not real, and that's not how it works, and that can't happen.
	And also, I'm going to scratch her book, not that I'm going to tickle Goldilocks, that she knows.
	I mean, I find that stuff...
	Completely fascinating. And she started telling me about her dreams, and I've been curious about what she's dreaming at night.
	She's understanding that concept and so on.
	Oh, and it's just, I mean, it's an incredible thing to watch the development of these language skills, of these imagination skills, and these social skills.
	Just amazing. So yeah, if those are the updates that you're looking for, I hope that there are some use.
	Yeah, yeah. And I had one more question, and this is probably the biggest thing going on in my life as far as...
	Something that I'm really having a lot of trouble mulling over and planning is school and more specifically, you know, government school and the way everything is structured, especially where I live.
	And so one of the biggest problems that we've run into is what are we going to do when our child, you know, is of age where, you know, they can start going to school and all those things or should we put them in a school or should we homeschool them and There's a million other routes you can go.
	But I was just kind of curious about how you handled that and what your plans are if you care to share that.
	I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's nothing set in stone at the moment other than, you know, I'll move heaven and earth to keep her out of public school.
	I mean, we've explored some private schools.
	I've taken her to an open house at a private school a couple of times and Talking to the teachers about their approach, their philosophy, I've heard good things from other libertarian parents.
	Steph Kinsella is very keen on Montessori and I've heard some very good things about Montessori.
	I've also looked into things like unschooling and the sort of Sudbury Valley schools where...
	A four-year-old has the same vote as a principal and the teachers can be fired by the students every year and there's no courses, there's no curriculum, there's no exams, there's no tests, there's no homework.
	The kids just pursue what it is that they want to pursue in their own particular areas of interest.
	And yeah, I mean, it's a tough road to hoe.
	There's no question. There's not a lot of easy answers around this kind of stuff.
	And so I certainly don't think – I don't think she's going to work in traditional schools as a whole.
	And I mean I think she's just too independent and too energetic and she's just not used to being confined.
	You know, I was sort of thinking, you know, when I go to the mall and I see all of these kids, they're almost all in strollers and they sit in strollers for a long time.
	I was actually reading something about how this is probably quite bad for kids in terms of circulation but – I mean, if kids aren't used to that kind of confinement, I don't know how they're going to work in that sort of traditional sit-down.
	She might dare stand up and empty her bowels without asking first.
	I mean, that would be a nightmare for a teacher, you know?
	I mean, it's just, you know, those basic things, you know?
	And so, I live in Central Texas, to give you an idea of my geographical location.
	So, I mean, there are Montessori schools around here.
	One of the major problems that you run into, as well, is how the schools are funded and how taxation works.
	If it's the right environment, my opinion is try to make your decisions about everything in life as if there's no government because it's not your fault there is a government and you can't do a damn thing to control what the government does anyway.
	In the short run. And so, you know, if you find a school that you like and that your kids like and you can hopefully afford it in some way, who cares where they get their funding from?
	Who cares who science pieces...
	I mean, you can't control that anyway.
	And you certainly wouldn't want to deny your child the opportunity for quality education based upon an ideology, which I consider to be true, about something you can't change anyway.
	Right, right. And I agree with that as well.
	But one of the things I was just going to say is that Because of the standardized testing and the way that schools have to teach, a lot of the private schools, especially the religious ones around here, are no different from any kind of public school in any way.
	It's only gotten worse with this No Child Left Behind stuff.
	And these initiatives, right, around, you know, if we get our kids to be experts in X, Y, and Z, the teachers get bonuses, the schools get free unicorns and all this kind of stuff.
	Sorry, the free unicorns will be available the moment this actually happens.
	But all that's happened, of course, is that the teachers are either teaching the test or cheating, or both.
	Or, you know, I'm sure there are people who are doing neither, but I don't think they're in the vast majority.
	And so your kids end up...
	With this rote memorization, which to me is the absolute death of learning.
	And so, yeah, I think it's, you know, education is just one of the really challenging aspects of philosophical parenting, of peaceful parenting.
	And I don't know.
	I don't know what's going to happen in the long run.
	And the reason I don't know what's going to happen in the long run is that I cannot decide for Isabella what the best education is for her.
	I mean, I can provide her, I can give her opportunities, I can give her choices, but it is her enthusiasm and preferences that is going to determine how she's going to be educated.
	So, I mean, I wish I could give you answers.
	I'll certainly keep people posted, but my goal is to give her opportunities.
	I mean, it's like eating, right? You give them choices that don't include poison and, you know, figure out where they want to go.
	And so with education, I give them, I'm going to give her choices that don't include the poison in public school and then see where she wants to go, if that helps.
	Well, I mean, I look back on my childhoods.
	And, of course, I was raised in a public institution, but it would be interesting.
	I mean, I couldn't imagine having any kind of preference or choice related to school.
	I mean, I hated school, but there was no choice in the matter at all, and I was never asked even what school I wanted to go to, not even what type.
	So it would be interesting to just see what happens with a child who has those options, especially when you get into middle school and high school when you're practically an adult.
	As far as your decision making, but it would be really interesting, and I would be really interested to follow that route, you know, to give us updates.
	And I just wanted to let you know that the podcast related to this kind of stuff is the stuff that I really take to heart because it's the stuff that I run into on a daily basis.
	You know, using you to be in my life with my relationships with my family and friends and all those things.
	I do love the, you know, topics on economics or philosophy or government and all those things.
	I think they're great. And, you know, when you're talking to people about volunteerism, of course, they're going to be asking these kinds of questions.
	But I just want to throw that out there and thank you very much.
	Well, thank you so much.
	I really do appreciate that.
	You know, I can't tell you how much I am.
	I mean, I'm emotionally moved by the degree to which people find philosophy of value in their daily lives.
	I mean, And I mean, particularly if it's something that I've talked about or discussed or made arguments or cases for, I just find it, that to me is such a beautiful thing.
	To see the degree to which, I mean, the emails that I get from parents saying that they've abandoned aggression with their children and how positive a result it's been.
	And in relationships where people have abandoned falsehoods and manipulations and aggressions, not out of, you know, any sense of evil, just out of not knowing...
	Any particular alternatives?
	And so when you say, you know, the value of UPB or ethics with family and with friends has been fantastic and when you're thinking about how you're going to raise your children as peacefully and positively as possible, it makes me more happy than I think I dare say.
	And it makes the trials and challenges of philosophy all the more worthwhile.
	So I really, really want to thank everybody who shares with me that and to say To say that I'm proud is ridiculous because it's not my doing in that way, but I am enormously thrilled at the degree to which people are finding philosophy to be of value in the only sphere that we have any direct control over, which is our interactions with others.
	So thank you so much for sharing that.
	Thanks, Seth. All right.
	Next. Next is Keith.
	Keith. Hi.
	Hi. Hi.
	All right, Steph. Why do people always say my name like that?
	Anyway... Oh, you know why.
	It's because of the Rolling Stones.
	Yeah. Exactly.
	I've got a couple of points which I want to make.
	I've written them down so I can get straight to the point.
	But it's about my personal relationships and developing my personal relationships.
	I wanted to mention something that had happened to me and then apply it to how I think it relates to you as well.
	And hopefully the listeners, if they're feeling the same way, that might be helpful to them.
	So, shall I, shall I, shall I? Okay, so, I recently had, I know I sounded a bit upbeat but I was quite sad about it, I had a bit of a break off in the friendship that had become pretty close for me because I think mainly the roles I had placed upon this person and I think how that relates To you is I think I've kind of put a bit of a roll on you and I also wanted to apologise about something I wrote to you recently.
	I won't go into the details but I kind of felt like afterwards that I'd used some unintentional but unconscious tricks to kind of get your attention.
	So I kind of brought up stuff with your family, not in an insulting way, but in a way of saying I sympathised.
	And in Europe, it kind of filtered out all that stuff and got to the point of what I was actually writing to you in the first place.
	And I just thought, why did all that stuff?
	And then I listened to your podcast about, I think it was about someone and his mother, Where his mother had been very, almost, I think, like a girlfriend or something, using all these emotional tricks and stuff as well.
	And I think a mixture of all that.
	So I just noticed that.
	And so I wanted to apologize about that, first of all.
	Oh, no problem. I appreciate that.
	I apply that to you. I think I apply that to the people.
	Right. Sorry, you're kind of choppy.
	So if you could ask your question, I think I'll have to try and answer it without a conversation because it's very hard to hear what you're saying.
	Yeah of course. So yeah first of all I wanted to apologize about that and then I just wanted to sort of mention that I think with my friend,
	certainly with you as well, and even my therapist noticed that I pushed people away by It's a means of doing things that are going to ensure that I vilify myself or think that the other person is going to vilify me.
	So, I feel like someone might attack me.
	And I become irrational and therefore you or anyone else on say the FDR boards is going to become defensive.
	And what happens is people get into a position where they speak to me because they feel they can't deal with me.
	And I'm just wondering what would be the best ways of kind of not putting people in roles and just being more and being more open.
	Right, right, right.
	These are things I've noticed.
	Right. I think those are great questions, and that's tough, right?
	I mean, so if you've grown up in an environment of aggression, or if it's not sort of outward aggression, there's sort of win-lose situations in families or in churches, and this, of course, is Particularly the case in government education or government controlled education where it's win-lose.
	It's hard to develop a sense of positive win-win human community involvement.
	And... My approach to this, which I talk about in the free book, Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love at freedomandradio.com forward slash free, there's a section in it called Simon the Boxer where I talk about how...
	I have a theory about how we're driven to recreate early experiences and why we do that.
	So why somebody who is abused as a kid would end up in an abusive situation as an adult.
	And finding...
	A warm, predictable, positive, helpful, firm, courteous, resourceful, and loving human community as an adult is a significant challenge.
	I was chatting with some kids at a playground the other day, and we were chatting about movies, and they recommended a movie called The Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
	It's based, I think, on a British book, or maybe it's an American book.
	I watched it for a few minutes, and...
	It's pretty horrifying, you know, what sort of passes for comedy these days.
	It's just pretty horrifying.
	I mean, the brother is really mean and the kids are incredibly horrible and it's like a kid's school.
	The school is irrelevant and ugly and all this kind of stuff.
	It's just nasty all around.
	That's considered to be, you know, ha-ha-ho-ho funny.
	And it's on Netflix, if you want to check it out.
	I couldn't make it too far.
	Because it's just like, ha-ha, isn't it funny how brutal society is to children?
	And then this goes all the way back.
	I mean, there's, I think, a Christmas story about the kid who wants the BB gun.
	There's this bully sort of torturing him and parents who don't listen and all that kind of stuff.
	And this is just...
	It's just horrendous. I mean, this is like, ha, ha, ha, these brutalized prisoners.
	You know, the elder brother, who's like twice the size of the kid, is, you know, is mentally abusive, is telling him horrifying stories about, you know, how he's going to get his head ripped off when he goes out for Halloween, if he goes too close to a certain place.
	You know, lunges at him, saying he's going to kill him.
	He's going to kill him, murder him.
	And of course, this is a little kid.
	Does he know what's right and what's not?
	And... The kid has to lock himself in his room and can't even come out to pee.
	He's so terrified of being physically assaulted, if not killed, by his brother.
	Isn't that funny? I mean, imagine!
	He put a wife in an arranged marriage in that situation, where the husband has threatened to kill her and she's hiding out in her room behind a locked door, desperately needing to pee, but terrified to come out for fear of being assaulted.
	Can anyone think that you would milk that for comedy?
	I mean, it's astonishing.
	It's absolutely astonishing.
	And this is considered to be G-rated family fucking entertainment.
	And, oh my god, I mean, it's just horrendous.
	I mean, it's horrendous from top to bottom, back to front.
	And I shouldn't be shocked.
	I shouldn't be appalled.
	Yet, I remain so.
	So, that is sort of the reality of My experience with these things.
	I hope in a way, of course I need to stay shocked, right?
	I'm not going to expose Issy to any of this kind of stuff.
	So anyway, as far as trying to find a positive and benevolent human community, that's very hard.
	It's very hard. So I don't have any particular answers.
	I think that quitting aggression, to me, is like quitting any other drug.
	And I think that's more than a metaphor, because cortisol is a stimulant.
	Our desire to repeat early patterns is so strong that changing it, I think, produces symptoms that are similar to withdrawal.
	It's just my opinion, right? So, you know, if you're asking me, well, how do I quit aggression?
	How do I quit being in aggressive situations?
	How do I quit wanting to be aggressive or wanting to be around aggressive people?
	Well, to me, it's like, how do I quit heroin?
	If you're going to quit heroin, as far as I know, right, you have to quit the drug culture, right?
	You have to quit people. You have to quit being around people who do heroin.
	I mean, it's not just...
	The drug is the community, right?
	The drug is the social environment.
	It's not just the thing itself, right?
	I mean, if you're a drinker, you know, and you want to quit drinking, I think the first thing that people say is try not to be around people who drink.
	Because that normalizes it and that reinforces it and you may also either get explicit or implicit pressure to drink.
	And so, to me, it's a whole environment thing.
	If you want to quit aggression, you need to not be around people who are aggressive.
	You need to not be around people who are aggressive.
	And to me, it's similar to quitting any other kind of addiction.
	If you're quitting smoking, you can't go to the house where everybody lights up after dinner.
	I mean, you can. It just means that you're that much more likely to fail.
	So, that would sort of be my first suggestion, to just be sensitive to situations of aggression and the discomfort that that produces, and to try to avoid those situations.
	I mean, whether permanently or not, I don't know.
	I mean, people say, I don't know, after they quit smoking for a number of years, they can be around people who smoke or whatever, it's not the end of the world, but I would definitely suggest just not being around people who are aggressive or abusive.
	And through that process, you will develop a sensitivity to aggression and abuse that doesn't happen.
	I think studies have shown that if you place someone even a loud continuous noise, their brain stops processing it.
	But then if you take them out of that environment, put them back into that environment, they're like, holy crap, this is loud.
	But you just stop hearing it after a while.
	I think the same thing is true of aggression.
	If you're out of aggression, Out of aggressive interactions for a while, then when you go back in, you'll really notice them and know how to avoid them, but let's notice the discomfort that they produce.
	So I think the withdrawal of, you know, whether temporary or not, from relationships where there is aggression so that you can begin to hear more subtle sounds and so that you can also grow back your ability to be negatively affected by aggression, I think that's really, really important.
	And I think after a certain amount of time away from aggression, you will Recoil from it and hopefully that will move you more towards people who are against aggression as well, if that helps.
	Oh yeah, I mean that is definitely my goal because it's been proven just from my experience that aggression and violence don't get you anywhere.
	I think my needs to do with that is how much that was normalized for me.
	I think in terms of me saying about the father figure stuff, I just recently, in my own mind, because we don't speak anymore, I had a grandfather who was kind of my hero, and I had to realize that he was certainly not a hero because, again, from another podcast you said, and this was like a very shocking, hard for me, but if I had problems with my mother, and my mother had problems with men, where's she going to get that from?
	So I had to look at that, and then I realised, my granddad's a massive misogynist, he's a bit of a bully, and just because he was nice to me as a child doesn't mean he applies universally to other people or his own children.
	So I think once I realised that, I've been feeling very vulnerable lately and the only strength I had as a child, I felt, has been taken away from me.
	So I've been feeling very insecure and my defenses have been up.
	So when it comes to letting go of him, I sometimes feel I need it.
	Like, because without it, I feel like I could, this might sound extreme.
	I feel like I might be killed.
	Does that sound extreme?
	Like, I feel like something awful could happen to me.
	It's this feeling of bread.
	And I think, you know, I think we talked about that before, that feeling is kind of like working with it, but it doesn't feel nice.
	No, I can understand that.
	Sorry, I would not take that lightly, that sense of personal doom or that sense of personal risk.
	I would not take that lightly at all.
	I think that's very important.
	And I hope that you will listen to it.
	Again, there's lots of different kinds of death in this world, right?
	Physical death, spiritual death, emotional death.
	And I would definitely take that kind of stuff very seriously, that you may be feeling at risk for the candle in your heart going out, not to be relit.
	And so I would definitely be careful of that.
	I think that there is a point of No return.
	And I'm not saying this is you or anywhere, but be aware of that.
	You know, be aware of that. I think there is a point of no return where too much imbibing of aggression or too much expressing of aggression does sort of kill the heart in ways that can't be recovered.
	And so, yeah, I would take that stuff very seriously.
	We ignore signs like that at our significant peril.
	And since you know that you want to get out of an aggressive lifestyle anyway, I think feeling very afraid of continuing in it is only going to motivate you further.
	So I hope that helps.
	Now listen, I'm so sorry to, again, your sound is pretty rough and I hate to sort of leave this topic if it's unfinished, but I want to make sure we've got a bunch of other callers that we have a chance to get to.
	No, I mean, no, that's great.
	I think I'm at the point now where it's kind of too late for me to go backwards.
	So I feel right in the middle of it.
	So, the only move is forwards.
	But, you know, they're great points.
	And, yeah, I just wanted to sort of mention that stuff as well.
	And, again, apologize for those kind of little unconscious tricks that I may or may not have been using.
	No sweat. It's no problem.
	And I appreciate you bringing that up, though.
	Oh, sorry. Somebody's asked, how did I resolve the shouting issue with Isabella?
	Well, I didn't resolve it.
	The great thing is that she resolved it.
	And, I mean, we've had a, so if I get a phone call, I mean, she would sort of, you know, because she's two and a half, she would, you know, tug at my And I sort of have to sit down and explain to her that I need to talk to people sometimes and I don't want her to interrupt me and so on.
	And the amazing thing is that she just internalizes this and it actually becomes a point of pride, right?
	So after we had the conversation, once she said, Daddy, you can yell at me, I knew that she got it, that it was not nice for the children.
	And she was trying to find a way out that.
	And so what has happened, and this is, you know, it's just one of these minor miracles that occurs with peaceful parenting that you don't necessarily look for, but just happens, which is the next time we were going to a playground, she said, she grabbed my hand or took my hand in hers and she turned to me and she said, Daddy, I'm not going to yell at the children.
	I'm like, tell me more, right?
	This is my, yeah, I love you and tell me more.
	So she just, it became a point of pride for her.
	She became very excited about the possibility of not yelling at the children.
	And now she tells me and then, you know, we played, had a great time with the kids and then she's, we're coming home and she says, Daddy, I didn't yell at the children.
	I said, Oh, that's fantastic.
	That's just wonderful. I think it's great.
	And I'm very happy that you did that.
	And I think it was a good thing to do.
	And she does that.
	And so now, if I'm on the phone, she'll hold her piece.
	And then afterwards, she said, Daddy, I didn't yell at you while you were on the phone.
	Or I didn't, you know. I'm like, oh, thank you.
	That's so wonderful. And so on.
	And that's...
	It just...
	I don't know. I don't know the alchemy that's going on in any particular detail, but I do know that you have the conversation.
	You don't try to force a resolution.
	You know, like, you have to promise me you're not going to blah, blah, blah, because that's just extracting obedience without comprehension.
	But you leave her to mull it over.
	You know, you leave her to mull it over.
	And she does.
	She thinks about it, because she's a pattern-recognizing machine, and so she thinks about it continually, and she recognizes that it's not a great thing to do, and then it becomes a point of pride for her to not do it, and that's what happens.
	It's amazing, but it's true.
	Mr. W, go for it.
	Hello. Hello.
	Hey, Steph. How's it going?
	It's going great. How are you doing, man?
	Good, good. So I've got to ask you a suggestion about...
	Could I just ask you to back off from your mic a little bit?
	You're buzzing quite a bit.
	Can you hear me now? That's much better.
	Thank you. Okay. So I started to read a lot and I got into Ayn Rand.
	But one thing about her writing is that she doesn't really show healthy relationships.
	A lot of her sex scenes are really heated and sometimes violent.
	And I'm wondering what fiction have you found that kind of like exemplifies healthy real-time relationships?
	Gosh, that's a great question.
	Well, I mean, the one that just sort of pops into my mind, probably just because I recently saw it, is that there's an adaptation of an Ian Foster novel we just did a movie review of a week or two ago called A Room with a View.
	And I think that has an example of the development of a healthy relationship between an atheist free thinker and a sort of repressed but passionate young Edwardian woman.
	And I thought that was quite nicely developed in...
	Now, the writer actually wrote a postscript to their relationship many years later where the guy ended up being unfaithful to her.
	So, I mean, but, you know, within the sort of movie or within the book itself, and the book is well worth reading myself, I think, for the development of that kind of intimacy.
	But it doesn't, I mean, usually it doesn't, you don't see it.
	I mean, because relationship, movies are about obstacles and problems and challenges to be overcome.
	And so you don't really see that kind of stuff.
	And the sad thing, in a way, of course, is that when the problems are resolved, The story ends.
	Right? So with Dominique and Howard Rourke, there is this completely psycho relationship.
	Like, I'm glad you got married to my greatest enemy.
	That allows me to experience the bitterness of growth even more pungently.
	You know, I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but it's lunatic.
	And, you know, it's just completely mad.
	And I don't think the exact basis of a healthy relationship is that kind of Tortured, semi-rapey crap.
	I just think she had a...
	A flair for melodrama that comes out of, I mean, to some degree her Russian history and to some degree the movies that she was most influenced by.
	I would assume in the late 20s and early 30s there was a lot of melodrama.
	And so I think that there is that, you know, that there's the, I mean, there's the great philosophy stuff in Ayn Rand and then there's the, you know, chiseled, jawed, rippling, pecks, Fabio cover story nonsense that goes on in her romances that, you know, the The tortured, hand-wringing sexual attraction slash repulsion that is all too loony for words and I think quite tragic.
	So, of course, when Dominique and Howard Rock are finally together, the story ends and you don't know how they handle having kids.
	You don't know how they handle in-laws.
	You don't know how they handle...
	You know, when the kids have been up for three nights in a row throwing up from some bike, you don't know how they handle it.
	And the same thing is true with Room of the View.
	Ah, they've had so many obstacles, and now, you know, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again, and then the movie ends.
	And there are some movies that touch upon longer-term marriage stuff.
	I was just watching one the other day with Jennifer Hanneson called Other People's Money, I think it is.
	No, not Other People's Money. Somebody could look it up.
	It's with Jennifer Aniston and Catherine Wheeler, I think her name is.
	And there is some longer-term married stuff in there.
	Nothing particularly inspiring, but it's people with money, I think it is.
	And there's some of that kind of stuff around, but I don't think that there is a lot of examples.
	I don't think there are a lot of examples of healthy, positive, happy, good relationships.
	You know, there tends to be negative or dysfunctional relationships, and then there tends to be relationships that are positive, but they're sort of like...
	Ned Flanders on The Simpsons.
	You know, they're positive but dippy.
	You know, they're only good. They're only happy because they're dumb kind of stuff.
	Right, right. So, you know, I wish I could recommend you more stuff.
	I think you kind of have to hold your nose a little bit with the relationship stuff with Ayn Rand and, you know, really focus on the politics, the economics and the philosophy in my opinion.
	I certainly don't think that I learned a lot about how to be married from Ayn Rand novels.
	I think there's a lot about how not...
	Yeah, that's kind of what I'm finding is that although you have a good process for creating a relationship, there really aren't any good examples out there in literature or other sources like that.
	I guess I have to create my own, right?
	Yeah, I think so. I think so.
	And, you know, if philosophy has something to do with friends with money, that's the name of the film.
	If philosophy has something to do with happiness in relationships, and if philosophy has been sort of stagnant for quite some time, then...
	Relationships will also have not significantly improved.
	And so I think that, you know, if there is to be happier relationships in the future, it's going to have to have something to do with philosophy, you know, because relationships are sort of applied philosophy in the same way that engineering is applied physics.
	And if you want your bridge to stand up, but you think that steel is cardboard and cardboard is steel because you lack basic physics, then your bridge is never going to stay up.
	So that's why I think, you know, always work on the physics and let the engineering take care of itself in the future.
	Right now, people's bridges in general don't fall down.
	They tend to fall down.
	I think that's just because there's some basic stuff that way.
	Okay. Well, thanks a lot.
	I love all the work you do.
	I know that was a quick question, so I'll let other people with deeper questions and inquiries get at you.
	That was a very deep question, and I wish I could do it justice, but that's a...
	That's a big question.
	And I hope, I mean, obviously I've got my book on relationships that hopefully will be of some utility.
	But yeah, I don't find a lot of good stuff in art that way.
	Okay. All right.
	Well, you have a good week. Thanks, man.
	Okay. Bye-bye. We have the nodding guacamole.
	I mean, sleepy salsa.
	The nodding guacamole.
	Sleepy salsa. All right.
	You're on, man. Hello?
	Hi. And now is the time on Freedom Man Radio where we dance or you talk.
	It's your preference. Please talk.
	Oh, okay. Sorry.
	I just had to adjust a couple of things there.
	Well, hey, thank you, Steph, for having me on.
	You mean your balls, right? Because you're sitting uncomfortably.
	That's what I always think of when a man says, I just had to adjust a couple of things.
	It's like, well, women don't understand this.
	You try... You try walking around with an animated shaved squirrel in your pants, I mean, you'd notice that they can take a little bit of castanet moving around a little anyway.
	Anyway, sorry, go on. No, no.
	Thanks for having me on, Steph. I appreciate it.
	I guess I want to start off with, are there any specific methods for peaceful parenting?
	Because I know you've mentioned before about don't yell at the child and stuff like that.
	And what books or websites would be good for someone to read who's just getting started?
	I mean, I got a podcast series where I talk about it that people have found helpful, and you can find that on the podcast page at my website.
	I haven't...
	I mean, I'm sort of inventing parenting.
	I mean, for many years I've thought about it, but I'm sort of inventing parenting as I go.
	I think... I mean, the only thing that I strongly suggest, the only thing that I suggest is you don't expose your kids to aggression.
	You don't expose your kids...
	To aggression. You don't yell at them.
	You don't hit them. You don't bully them.
	And you also don't allow them to see it between family members, right?
	So obviously mom and dad.
	You don't allow it.
	You don't expose them to it.
	And you know what's interesting is that you have all of these...
	I mean, when you're going in a radically different direction from...
	What is practiced in society in general and also what I myself experienced as a kid.
	There's all the... I mean, you get these fear scenarios like, oh my goodness, you know, if I never expose my child to any aggression, then people are just going to, you know, walk all over her and so on.
	And I've also had people who email me and say, toughen her up, expose her to a bit of aggression, it'll do her the world of good if she ever...
	And the reality is it's not the case.
	Izzy is... Incredibly assertive and non-aggressive in herself.
	So, you know, if as happens from time to time, she gets, you know, some kid, you know, is swinging something around and clips her on the arm or something like that, you know, just the inevitable rough and tumble of interacting with other kids or, you know, she's in a... She's in a gymnastics program and every now and then she'll bump into some other kid or some other kid will bump into her.
	And she says, don't do that.
	I don't like that. Very calmly and very assertively.
	Sometimes not so calmly.
	But there's no retaliation.
	There's no aggression back.
	So she's very assertive about her own personal space and what she likes and what she doesn't.
	And that really is not an issue.
	So it's almost like an inoculation against aggression.
	And so I think Parental Effectiveness Training is a book that I thought was good in this area about negotiation with children and just listening to kids and so on.
	But I mean, I think there are a number of ingredients, right?
	So the thou shalt not, right, to be aggressive with one's children, I think is...
	Of all the people in the world that you would ever legitimately be aggressive with, your children are the least in that category, without a doubt.
	No question. Because they have so few options.
	I'm aware every day that Izzy did not choose to have me as a dad, did not choose to be born here or anything like that.
	So I'm the one who has to win her love and affection so that when she's older or hopefully every day she would choose me as a parent over Over every other parent that she could think of or who has met.
	I mean, that's just my challenge.
	And the same thing, of course, is true with my wife.
	My wife could, you know, probably go marry whoever she wanted.
	And I have to make sure that her experience of being married to me is as great as possible.
	And of course, the same thing is true of listeners.
	Philosophy is a bitch slap and a half sometimes to the nads.
	And people could go off and do anything they want rather than listen to this show or my podcast or have anything to do with what I'm doing.
	We have to make it as positive and enjoyable and pleasant as possible and powerful as possible.
	So there's the thou shalt nots, right?
	Don't be aggressive. That's going to bring up a whole bunch of stuff for just about anyone who's had any experience with aggression, which is, I think, most of us.
	So there's that challenge.
	But it really is just the extension of personhood.
	It is just the extension of personhood.
	The other thing that I would also recommend is to remember that there are times when what you need to do as a parent is inconvenient to your child.
	Right?
	So if I have to go for an appointment and get my driver's license renewed or some such nonsense, it's not what Isabella wants to do.
	I mean – She has to come. I guess I've got to go.
	But it's explaining to her that, you know, and really thanking her for doing stuff which is not number one on her list of things to do.
	You know, I really appreciate that, you know, you came to this place.
	I know it wasn't a lot of fun for you, but thank you so much for being so great about it.
	And now let's do something that's fun for you and all that kind of stuff.
	So kind of just like that kind of give and take and whatnot.
	Yeah, I mean, it's exactly what you would do with just about anybody else, right?
	I mean... If, you know, if you had a first date with someone and for some reason you had to, you know, drop past a dentist on the way, what you'd say is, listen, oh man, I'm so sorry, we had, you know, we're going to have this date, you know, my tooth is hurting, I had to go to the dentist and they checked it out and I'm so sorry about that and...
	That's what you would do. And then you'd say, you know, let's do something extra special.
	I mean, why would there be any less consideration for your child, the flesh of your flesh, the fruit of your loins, the calm of your old age and the sugar of your life?
	I mean, why would you have less consideration for your child than you would for somebody you just on some first date with?
	And so, to me, just that level of consideration and politeness and appreciation.
	You know, when I was driving to Porkfest, I mean...
	Does Izzy want to spend two days in a car?
	God, no, right? But she, you know, she was fantastic about it.
	And so, you know, try and make it as much fun as possible and then really, really thank your child for stuff that they do that is, you know, and it's harder for children to defer gratification and not do what they want because, you know, their sense of time is different and all that kind of thing.
	They're less in control. And so I think it's just that level of consideration.
	You know, just treat your children with the same consideration you would treat your average child Waiter, for heaven's sakes, right?
	I mean, that's sort of my approach to stuff, and I find that is really, really helpful.
	Okay, well then, my next question how to deal with that, and I've heard of this from the, you know, minarchists, you know, time and again, is that under a state of society, how would a phenomenon such as like despotic local warlords, because a lot of survivalists and other types of people have been kind of worried about this, that if we have anarchy, it'll be like a violent version of it, especially if it's a version where it's like an act.
	Yeah, look, I mean, that is, you know, with all due respect to your friends, I mean, these are fine questions, but, you know, frankly, these are people who get their political philosophy from Mad Max movies, which is sort of like getting your cooking advice from Silence of the Lambs, you know?
	Not everything goes great with fava beans and a nice white Chianti...
	But it is, you know, as far as warlords go, the absence of a state requires certain preconditions in human society.
	So if the state simply collapses because of famine or religious warfare or hyperinflation, that is not philosophical anarchy.
	That's like saying, okay, so let's say that all the churches in the country are built by some contractor who uses really crappy materials, because they're going to be held aloft by faith, he believes, perhaps.
	And then all of the churches sort of collapse in the space of a year or two.
	That is not the same as philosophical atheism.
	That's just a collapse. That doesn't grant any knowledge or any advancement in philosophy or human understanding or anything like that.
	That's simply a collapse.
	So there is no possibility in my mind that anarchism will, as we understand it, will ever arise out of a collapse.
	And so if that's the way that they're looking at it, then yeah, okay, they can understand that, right?
	I mean, there's all these problems.
	I mean, there's some benefits, but there's significant problems with Somalia because there was no philosophical dedication to the non-aggression principle and property rights in Somalia.
	The state just collapsed and nobody could grab hold of the next thing, right?
	So although I think Belgium's been without a government now for, what is it, a year, a year and a half?
	Anyway, so it is a matter of human progress.
	It is a matter of human progress that develops into anarchism, into a stateless society.
	And so people will only get rid of government when they no longer see its particular need anymore.
	I mean, they will accept the moral arguments, of course, right?
	But there just won't be any particular need for it.
	And there's no condition in history where that has occurred, right?
	So anyone who talks about a future free society has to, I think, to some degree explain why this has not occurred in the past.
	You can't explain that, right?
	And I think that the answer, hey, it's time to switch drums.
	The answer is, of course, that childhood has been brutalized for most of human history.
	And that's, you know, what is a warlord?
	A warlord is somebody who wants to be a professional hitman, a murderer, a murderer.
	Well, where do murderers come from?
	Well, they're not born, they're made.
	Monsters are created by monsters.
	And so, if you have a plurality in society of people who wish to murder and to dominate others through violence, through hacking off limbs and chopping up bodies and whatever, right?
	Then you have a society hugely composed of extremely traumatized people, and I would invite skeptics to listen to the audiobook progression of the reading of Lloyd DeMoss' book, The Origins of War and Child Abuse, for more on this.
	And so if you have a society that is full of murderers and their victims, then you have a society full of sadists and masochists, which means you have a society full of people who've been incredibly traumatized as children to the point where they have simply gone beyond evil to Base biological predation.
	This is not a philosophical situation.
	I mean, if parents don't accept the non-aggression principle, the non-aggression principle will never be accepted by anyone else.
	Let me say that again. This is so important.
	If parents do not accept the non-aggression principle, the non-aggression principle will never be accepted by anyone else.
	If parents do not accept the self-ownership of their children, Then self-ownership, then therefore property rights, will never be accepted by anyone else.
	So, this is why I say, a free and peaceful society comes out of free and peaceful families.
	And this is not, you know, it's not a new idea.
	The hand that rocks the cradle rules God.
	The world. That is an old saying.
	I think it's French. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
	Whoever influences infants and children dictates the future.
	And so, in a future society, the spread of virtue, morality, peace, nonviolence, honesty, is only going to be possible if the majority of people are raised with little to no Aggression and violence.
	Now, once we achieve that kind of society, warlordism will simply not be around.
	Will simply not be around.
	I mean, maybe there'll be the occasional person who goes on a rampage because they have a brain tumor, but that's like saying that, you know, there's no difference between a cat and a lion because occasionally cats go feral and bite people.
	Right. It's an extraordinary aberration for a cat to go feral or get rabies and bite someone.
	And it's indication of illness, not malintent.
	And so, yeah, occasionally, blah, blah, blah.
	But people with brain tumors don't tend to make very effective warlord leaders, particularly if they don't have any followers.
	Yeah, go ahead. Oh, no, sorry.
	Yeah, exactly. You know, because obviously the warlord type situation is, I mean, like if you're dealing in a quote-unquote anarchic situation where the presumption is it's chaotic and violent because the state collapsed and stuff happened too quickly and it wasn't philosophical at all, that...
	On one level you would be dealing with just people doing violent actions out of desperation for like lack of supplies and that sort of thing.
	But what would happen is that given enough time you would have despotic people form like gangs and stuff and then that would kind of build up and up to like different warlords and all that which technically if that builds up more into different alliances between different despotic warlords that would be kind of like a reestablishing of the state.
	So ergo Yeah, you can definitely learn how to deal with stuff like that, but that's kind of like a stopgap method.
	Long term, what's the strategy?
	And that's why I've been really looking to what you've been mentioning about the stateless society, peaceful parenting, all that kind of stuff.
	Because, I mean, yeah, even if you achieve the stateless society, everything's fairly peaceful.
	Yeah, there's the occasional malcontent.
	And I've discussed this kind of similar notion before about the occasional psychopath and whatnot.
	But I was kind of just asking about the local warlord type thing, just how that would work.
	Sorry, the other thing I would mention too is I would also turn the question back and say, well, what people are talking about in terms of local warlords is an apt description of what currently exists.
	See, people think the state's like one thing, right?
	But, I mean, I don't know how many layers I have between me and the Prime Minister of Canada and then...
	The IMF, the World Bank, the UN, and God knows whatever else is layers of bureaucracy.
	But, you know, local councilmen, city councilmen, there's municipal, there's provincial, there's federal, there's, I mean, crazy stuff, right?
	So, in terms of like, what about local warlords?
	It's like... What do you mean?
	What if there are local warlords?
	There are local warlords right now!
	They just happen to be in three-piece suits with briefcases because they've outsourced some of the enforcement.
	So, it's not like, well, what if anarchy, there's local warlords?
	It's like, Well, at least I'd get a chance to move.
	I don't know. There'd be competition among the warlords for less warlordism, but the warlords can't enforce passports.
	I don't know what. I mean, people ascribe to anarchism these possible negatives that are actually staring them right in the face.
	They just can't see it because of propaganda.
	Well, yeah, of course. I mean, that kind of stuff is obvious as well.
	Sorry, just before I missed this in the chat window, please hold your question for a sec, because somebody has written, my journey in peaceful parenting is what eventually led me here.
	I would suggest Alfie Kohn, A-L-F-I-E-K-O-H-N. Russ Green, Naomi Aldort, A-L-D-O-R-T, Parenting for Humanity podcast, to name a few people who have more to say about non-punitive parenting.
	This does not come with any stamp of a rule of mine, other than the fact that it's a listener who I trust.
	So, I would definitely...
	I would definitely check those out for more on Peaceful Parenting.
	But I'm sorry about interrupting. That scrolls past and then I can't find it, so go ahead.
	No, no, that's fine. It's good to get the questions from folks in the chatroom, especially if they can't get on and whatnot.
	Okay, so my last question, and then I just had two quick things to mention after that.
	My last question has to be, does common law have any place in a stateless society, or would it otherwise be irrelevant?
	Common law? Well, I would say yes, because we have examples of that from history.
	I mean, ancient Iceland, Dark Ages or early medieval Ireland, these are situations where there was no state.
	And what is called common law, and common law is the generally accepted and culturally transmitted ways of resolving disputes.
	And they often involve things like, you know, where guilds are restitutions and ostracism and so on.
	These are the organic ways in which Society has developed its rules and refined those rules over time.
	And so, yeah, I think that that will be the case.
	I think that there will be a bare minimum of standards that will have to be agreed to by all DROs or dispute resolution organizations of relevance.
	You know, for instance, there was nobody who built railway lines who built them to a different gauge in America when they were all being built.
	I mean, you didn't just, hey, I'm going to make mine a foot narrower because I'm an idiot, right?
	I mean, people come up.
	With these kinds of standards.
	You know, there was a private road that was built here, and they didn't have those Hot Wheels loop-de-loops in them.
	They didn't make them, you know, three miles wide or two inches across.
	They had the standard lanes that everybody's used to because that's the way it goes.
	They didn't change the grades or the speeds at which you turn off and on the highway.
	They made them standard, so they didn't suddenly have a right-hand turn or something like that.
	And so people work towards standardization.
	I mean, I could set up an internet that didn't use TCPIP, but who the hell would use it?
	I could set up some email network that used carrier pigeons and smoke signals and the color-coded underwear on a clothesline, but who the hell would care and use it?
	So standardization is going to be the bare minimum of how these transactions occur in the same way that cell phone companies share data with each other in order to Hit you with roaming charges and so on.
	So, you know, this kind of common working together and data sharing, even among competitors, is going to be very important.
	And there's going to be a bare minimum of what is going to be necessary.
	Now, there's going to be more complex stuff.
	Like, I don't want a DRO that enforces 100-year leases across the other side of the world, because that's a lot of overhead I don't want to pay for.
	But I do want one that protects my persons and property, and so do other people.
	So I think there'll be a bare minimum of that.
	And I think that would be pretty much the equivalent of common law.
	You know, like, when I agreed to some Apple thing the other day, it's 53 pages of tight text.
	I'd love to meet the person other than the lawyer who's read through that all the way and has accepted it.
	It's a EULA, right, so to speak, so people just accept it.
	That stuff's going to have to be more simple in a free society.
	But I think there will be those bare minimum standards that go across different organizations, and then they become more complex based upon various specializations.
	Okay, great. I also just, you know, I noticed in the chat room there was posted a link to, I don't know if it was you or somebody else, posted a link to the Bomb and the Brain YouTube playlist, and I just noticed that the first video, which was the introduction, was actually deleted.
	And, you know, other people also were kind of mentioning that, so I don't know what the deal is there.
	I just, like, I was kind of rushing to your fence saying, well, maybe you're reshooting it or whatever, but...
	I'll check that out after the show.
	I don't recall doing that. Okay, and I'd just like to take a quick opportunity to just remind folks that if you are in Texas, please just give me a call or send me an IM or something over Skype and whatnot.
	Also take a look in the forums for Texas Skype group.
	I'm just trying to find other FDR listeners who are also in Texas.
	And thank you again, Steph, for having me on.
	You're very welcome. All right, I think we have time, as I want to say, for a quickie.
	Hi, here's Alec back again from Germany.
	Oh, hi. Yeah, I had another one that just came up in my mind.
	See, I thought when you said I talked to you Sunday, I thought you meant next Sunday.
	Just kidding, go on. Yeah, also for the people who are curious, my mother is from London, so that's where I've got my accent from.
	Ah, cool. Yeah, what I wanted to say, it came up also quite recently, especially when talking about Ron Paul and about people trying to go into politics in order, like, to try to get rid of the state and joining politics and that That doesn't work.
	I think you called it out for that, that people should come and show someone who would go to a bunch of drag addicts and go into the group and try to get rid of this That thing, the drug addicts, or going into the mafia.
	And I don't know if I'm wrong or got it wrong, but what I wanted to say, there are actually two things.
	I mean, there's a lot of voluntary work, especially in Germany.
	I did that as well, where you really go to homeless people, to drug addicts, to alcoholics, and you try really to get them out there, and you go and actually live with them.
	So that was the one thing.
	And the other thing is also undercover cops.
	They are like undercover cops going into mafia and sometimes, you know, burst them out and actually destroy the whole mafia just because of one stupid undercover cop.
	Or also drug deals and all that stuff.
	So is that maybe a metaphor for that it could be maybe possible to go into politics with the approach of, you know, getting rid of the state?
	No, I don't think so.
	And tell me if I've gotten your metaphor wrong, but if you're saying, so there's people who go in and attempt to reduce drugs, attempt to reduce drug addicts or get drug addicts off the street and so on, charitable organizations, and I'm sure those people do a lot of good.
	And more power to them, hats off to them, I think that's great.
	But the metaphor would be, so the goal of this charity is to go and help Drug addicts.
	So the metaphor would be that you need to join this organization, get to the top, and then have it harm drug addicts, and have it get people more addicted to drugs, to turn it against its core purpose.
	Because the goal of the state is to have power.
	I mean, it's not to help the poor.
	Oh my god, how well are the poor being helped by the state relative to how they were being helped by the free market?
	The data is very clear.
	I was thinking the group of drug addicts is representing the state.
	They want more and more drugs and more and more and more equal to power.
	And you go as supported by a charity organization, which could be, let's say, an anarchist party.
	And you go into there and try to get rid of it.
	Or get rid of them.
	Or convince them that anarchy is great.
	That wasn't my metaphor.
	But, I mean, I think there's a...
	First of all, the drug addicts who don't want to be cured are never going to be part of this organization anyway, right?
	They're just going to go off and get their drugs and not get involved in this charity or not receive any benefits from this charity.
	Yeah. But the other thing, too, is that...
	And this is a sort of preview of an argument or an idea that I'm working on.
	Which is the state, we always look at the state like supply, right?
	So the government gives protectionist rackets to big corporations and it gives welfare to people and it gives, quote, gives all of this sort of stuff.
	And that's the supply side.
	But all of these transactions, of course, are both supply and demand, right?
	Supply and demand. And you can't really solve any equation or any social interaction that's problematic with addressing both supply and demand.
	And so if people stop wanting stuff from the state, and if people begin to socially disapprove of those who take things from the state, Then you will start to reduce the demand for the state.
	Now, if you reduce the demand for the state, then people who are power-hungry will stop wanting to go into politics because there will be fewer people lining up to kiss their ring and tell them how great they are if they only give them some subsidy or some tax break or some benefit.
	And so there's one thing where you can do is you make the case to go into the state and to reduce the supply.
	That's the Ron Paul argument, right?
	I'm going to reduce the supply.
	I'm going to cut stuff. I'm going to cut stuff.
	But this, I mean, this is a lot of the arguments about the drug war, right?
	A lot of the arguments about the drug war is, you know, we're going to cut off the supply of drugs at the source, right?
	We're going to prevent drugs from being imported and distributed and we're going to have really heavy sentencing for drug dealers and so on, right?
	And that's going to, you know, solve the problem of drugs.
	Of course it doesn't, right? We know that.
	And so my argument to some degree is let's stop focusing on cutting supply.
	Let's focus on cutting demand.
	And the way that you cut demand is pretty simple, right?
	I mean, if you're really concerned about sweatshops in Singapore and you're not going to go over and, you know, with Steven Seagal and Rambo, liberate the children from the sweatshops, then what you do is you start to mount a case which says, look, these companies are buying shoes made from sweatshop exploited children.
	And what happens then is you get a boycott and you say, I'm not going to buy from you as long as you're underpaying these children.
	Now, you understand, I'm not saying these are all economically sound arguments, but this is sort of a metaphor, right?
	And so you'd say, look, you've got to stop paying these kids properly or, you know, we're going to continue to paint you in a bad light and we're going to continue to not buy your products.
	And so if you want to reduce the size and power of the state, you don't have to go and join the government and attempt to cut off the supply, because I would argue that the government is for that supply.
	So you're trying to get a charity about drug addicts to try and get more drug addicts addicted.
	I don't think that's really possible.
	What you want to do is go to the people and say, the shoes that you're wearing are made from underpaid, overworked children.
	And shame on you.
	Shame on you. For wearing these shoes.
	For being so greedy that you're willing to save a few bucks on some footwear where you can vastly afford more and cause these children to have no childhoods, no education, no futures and being worked to the bone.
	Shame on you. That's a very powerful thing to do in society.
	And if we can look at society and say, you support the state?
	Shame on you! Shame on you for supporting this violence.
	Shame on you for taking from the unborn.
	Shame on you for supporting war and the murder of millions.
	Shame on you for being so blind to violence.
	That's a very powerful thing to do in society.
	It doesn't mean that everybody will immediately turn away from the state.
	But imagine, you know, some company decides to go for some tax break or some advantage or tries to get some other good out of the state.
	Shame on you. Shame on you for turning on your fellow citizens in this way.
	Some guy goes and works on a weapons system for a defense contractor.
	Shame on you for feeding your family giblets of the blood of others.
	Shame on you. You are not welcome at my table.
	It's very powerful. But, but, it is much more confrontational for people.
	Right? You can be for Ron Paul and people may think, well, you know, a bit odd or whatever, it's a gold bug.
	You know, it has this weird hate on for the Fed or something.
	But it's not quite as controversial as, no, you cannot come to my dinner party because you work for the IRS. Shame on you for preying on your fellow citizens.
	That's hard, right? Yeah, I agree.
	I agree, Grae. And that's what politics is for, so people don't have to do...
	People are anxious about the state of the world, but so that they don't have to confront anyone in their personal life, they flock towards politics.
	But politics, you know, it's a form of anxiety management.
	So I feel like I can do something, rather than I'm doing something, right?
	True, true, true, true.
	I mean, it can go...
	Sorry, it can even go to the realm of...
	You know, you got a, I don't know, your third cousin is a teacher in the public school system.
	And look, I mean, I've made this case before and I'm, you know, occasionally misunderstood and I'm sure I'll be misunderstood again, but, you know, they are participating in the indoctrination of children for the sake of immoral rulers in power.
	I actually have a couple of friends who work in state schools as teachers, very young.
	They studied kind of with me.
	And yeah, I mean, if I confront them with that, like I've got one reaction is...
	They just don't get it.
	I think they're just so ignorant.
	They just simply don't get it.
	They're so ignorant. They're teachers. Right, right.
	Yeah, of course. They just shake their head and they didn't grasp it at all.
	And then they assume you're a lunatic.
	Yeah, and the other friend I have, well, he just says like, yeah, but...
	I can't really remember exactly what he says, but it's...
	Man's gotta eat, right? Yeah, he's gotta eat, he's a history teacher, he loves history, and that's the best way of making a living, because if you can't write books, and when you study history, it's like, you know, it's a safe job.
	Tell them to become a podcaster.
	There are podcasters who talk about history who, you know, the excuse of I have to do it to live is much less valid now.
	I mean, look, I've, you know, endlessly bitched at academics for free market academics for staying within the tenure system.
	But I mean, I actually have a lot...
	I mean, I don't fault Murray Rothbard for doing this or von Mises when he was doing it because, I mean, what other options?
	I mean, if they weren't particularly good at writing books, although I think they both were, what are the other options back then?
	Well, there weren't really many. But since the advent of alternate media and podcasting and the ease by which people can donate to others, the idea is saying, well, you know...
	There's no way that I can make any money out of my love of history.
	It's not true. I mean, God, I mean, how many people are, you know, really excited by philosophy and, you know, love to get themselves tied up in knots about things which are very hard emotionally and psychologically?
	Well, not, you know.
	But you can do it.
	I mean, you have to really dedicate yourself to the highest quality standards of excellence every day.
	And I'm really, really sensitive to that.
	I mean, you guys are my bread and butter.
	I mean, who's kidding who? I got to eat too, right?
	But that's one of the reasons why I'm so focused on creating, you know, challenging, provocative, exciting, actionable, actionable material stuff you can do something about.
	So if this guy's really interested in history, same thing I would say to the free market professors.
	Maybe there's more money to be made outside of being a public school teacher.
	Maybe, maybe there's more job security outside the tenure system.
	The tenure system, whether it's in a high school or junior high school or a university, I mean, that's not exactly diversifying your income, right?
	If your government agency just happens to go bankrupt or they have big layoffs or whatever, you're toast.
	But if you go into the podcasting world or into the articling world or whatever, right, then you're sort of spreading your income around the world.
	People donate to me from every continent in the world.
	I'm hedging my risk, so to speak.
	I believe that there's more income security and greater income potential for people outside of That's a good point.
	Income security. Because that's exactly the point which they say, oh, it's so unsecure.
	I can't live daily unsecureness.
	So that's a statement.
	I'll have to tell him that.
	Oh, yeah, absolutely. Look, I mean, I'm very aware that they say have your holdings or have your assets in a variety of currencies and around the world.
	Well, I mean...
	I get donations from all around the world.
	Now, of course, there are countries that are more important and some countries that are less important, but lots of teachers are getting laid off.
	He may want to, Brian.
	You don't have to sort of quit your job tomorrow and then say, I'm going to be a podcaster, but he can start to do this on the side and start to generate some opportunities for himself that way because who knows what the hell is going to happen to the school system.
	When the U.S. begins to default, right?
	How is his salary going to look when it's 15 to 20 percent inflation?
	I mean, give him some incentives and some excitement to go out and say, you know, the other thing I would say to this teacher as well is that...
	Sorry, let me just finish this point and then I'll listen.
	But the other thing I would say to your friend or teacher is wouldn't you love, wouldn't you love as somebody who loves history to be really connected I think?
	Wouldn't you rather be connected with people who share the same passion about history as you do and who are thrilled and excited and you can get into great conversations, i.e.
	this Sunday show, with people who share.
	I mean, imagine if I was teaching some philosophy course.
	Okay, maybe not me, but some average person teaching philosophy course to high school.
	People would just be dying inside every time you'd look at those glazed and indifferent eyes, right?
	But he can begin to branch out into a more secure, more diversified, greater income potential, sets his own hours, can work from home, doesn't require – it's not like you have to start a factory, not a lot of startup costs.
	And you actually get to connect with people who are as passionate about history or philosophy or car mechanics or whatever the hell you're talking about.
	You get to connect with the most interested people in your field in a worldwide audience.
	and what you do is they're permanently, right?
	So he teaches some class.
	It's gone. It's blown out the window.
	It's gone to the sands of history, buried, done.
	He does a podcast series on the Roman Empire.
	It's there till the end of freaking time.
	I mean, you're building something that is a permanent portfolio of value in the world that is only going to increase in value over time the more that you accumulate.
	And so I think there's so many arguments for this kind of diversification and the fact that you can do it on the side to start with that, I mean, anybody who's not seriously considering this really should look inwards and say, well, why the hell not?
	Yeah, wonderfully spoken.
	Definitely I will slap that around his ears.
	Thank you very much.
	But there's this one point, you say worldwide audience.
	Well, he teaches in German.
	You're lucky that you can actually communicate in English.
	Which is worldwide accepted, but where you with German, even worse, like let's say you're not even German, you're somewhere from, you know, I don't know, God knows, one of the rarest spoken languages, and then your field gets much, much smaller.
	So that is maybe a little thing, like a little downer maybe.
	Well, do you have any idea the number of German speakers in the world?
	Oh, yeah, there's quite a bunch, of course.
	I'm definitely not saying that.
	That's why I added, like, you know...
	I mean, if you spoke Gaelic, yeah, I could understand.
	But, I mean, what is the population of Germany at the moment?
	I think 90 million or something like that.
	90 million. Oh, my God!
	He's only got an audience of 90 million?
	Oh, my God!
	I mean, talk about a tiny market.
	I take it back. I didn't say anything.
	Let's see, so... No, no, no. I'm going to have a little bit of fun.
	Hang on. Let's see here. So 90, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, divided by, let's say he's got a class of 30.
	My goodness. My goodness.
	That's only 3 million times the size of the class that he's teaching right now.
	How is he going to penetrate that?
	Yeah, you're right. Oh, that's a challenge.
	And this, of course, is assuming that there's nobody outside of Germany who speaks German, which, of course, there are millions of people outside of Germany who speak German either as a first or second language, so it's probably 100, 110, 120 million people.
	And it's not impossible for a teacher to learn English.
	I'm just saying. I'm just saying.
	That would be my argument.
	Yeah, okay. That's true.
	That's true, yeah. Ah, cool.
	Okay, thanks very much for that response.
	Oh, you're very welcome. And if you're listening to this around August, please go to PatriotPulse.com.
	Throw a brother a click or two.
	I think we're still in the running up against, I don't know, some dude I don't know about.
	What's that? Patriot Pulse?
	What's that? It's PatriotPulse.com.
	I'm up against Jack Hunter, who has a much cooler name than I do.
	So if you want to come and vote for me, it is peaceful voting.
	I can't believe the number of people who say to me, oh, you don't like voting, but you want me to vote for this.
	It's like, dudes, dudes, dudes, dudes, dudes.
	This is peaceful voting. So, yeah, if you could go and vote, that would be great.
	And I'm going to stop now.
	We're over time because you people are just way too wonderful to hang out with.
	And I just...
	Let me do...
	It's been a while since I've done my listener appreciation rant, so I'll keep it short.
	And... I can tell you, the emails that I get are just brilliant and fantastic and wonderful.
	The questions that I get on these Sunday shows stagger my mind.
	And I have very high expectations of Freedom Aid Radio listeners.
	And you people, you people exceed my expectations on such a regular basis that I could be justly called irrational.
	A faith-based low estimate of Freedom Aid Radio listeners.
	So, you people are just fantastic and wonderful and amazing.
	I appreciate your donations.
	By popular demand, I have introduced a ridiculously staggering high donation, a level of $100 a month, if you want to sign up for that.
	I will wax your car with my forehead on a regular basis.
	That's really all I can offer. So thank you everybody so much for your support, for your encouragement.
	Thank you so much for the people who are going to come out to see me in New York, New York at Liberty Fest 2, at Libertopia, and who are coming on the Liberty Cruise and got a bunch of other stuff coming up.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	And it means the world to me that it means the world to you, the philosophical conversation that we're having.
	So thank you so much.
	And as always, if there's anything, anything, anything that I can do better or differently or more of this, less of that, a little bit more of the old slap and tickle, I am more than happy to...
	I'll accommodate you as best I can, depending on your screen cam resolution.
	So, have yourselves a great, great week, everybody, and be well, be happy.

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